Jennifer Feeley
Photo by Shi Lessner
Bio
Jennifer Feeley’s original writings and translations from the Chinese have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including FIELD, Epiphany, Cha, Words Without Borders, Chinese Literature Today, PEN America’s Glossolalia, Chinese Writers on Writing, and Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. She is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, for which she won the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and which received a 2017 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Award in Literature and Fiction. With Sarah Ann Wells, she is the co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema. Currently, she is translating a collection of short stories by Shi Tiesheng and the first two books in the White Fox Dilah seriesby children’s author Chen Jiatong. She holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University.
Mourning a Breast, written by acclaimed Hong Kong author Xi Xi, is lauded as the first literary work in which a Sinophone writer recounts her journey with breast cancer, a taboo subject in Chinese culture. It has been a success with both critics and readers: it was named one of the best ten books of 1992 by the China Times in Taiwan and also won the “Readers Best Book of the Year Award” from Taiwan’s United Daily. Additionally, it has been adapted for film.
In spite of the book’s significance, translating Mourning a Breast is a challenging undertaking. Its thirty chapters encompass a range of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, conversations, dictionary entries, lists, calculations, and images. There is no linear narrative, and each chapter can be read as an independent piece of writing. The book is neither a page-turner, nor is it experimental in a “trendy” way.
Because of the book’s unconventional nature, I believe it is best to translate a substantial portion of it before approaching publishers. As I am a freelance literary translator and writer, the grant will enable me to devote a significant amount of time to working on the project without worrying about financial concerns. Moreover, given the personal nature of the work, being able to sit down with the author and discuss the material is crucial, especially since Xi Xi has limited mobility in her right hand and cannot use email to correspond.
While translations of Chinese literature into English have increased exponentially, most of these works have been from mainland China and by male writers, while Hong Kong literature largely has remained on the margins. I am grateful for the National Endowment for the Arts' support, as I have long wanted to translate this book but likely wouldn’t be able to do so without this grant.M
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from Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi
[Translated from the Chinese]
My body began speaking more and more frequently, as though it had incited a revolution inside me, protesting a host of injustices. Was it staging a strike? Requesting some time off? Fighting for special allowances? I had no clue what its demands were. Our past attempts at dialogue hadn’t gone all that well, and now I could only be subjected to its lectures. Yet the problem remained: what exactly was it saying? Was my white blood cell count too low? Was I deficient in vitamins or minerals? Communication between people is difficult, but talking to the body is even more challenging. There are so many parts, each with its own grievances, the body’s language split into distinct regional dialects. Bones speak the language of bones. Muscles speak the language of muscles. Nerves speak the language of nerves. Ever since humans built the Tower of Babel, we’ve barely been able to converse with one another anymore.
After developing a tumor, my body continued signaling SOS. Even my doctor didn’t get the message, and I had no idea how to decipher it. I was body illiterate. In school, we often study a foreign language so that we won’t become monolingual illiterate. After leaving school, many people continue to learn additional languages, for no other reason than a desire to communicate with the larger world and understand what other people mean. Understanding others also helps us to know ourselves. Yet except for doctors, who is fluent in the body’s language? I’m an avid reader of fiction. I don’t necessarily need to read English-language fiction in translation, but I have to rely on translations when reading fiction from Italy, Germany, and other countries. How much of the spirit of the original work can we glean from the translation? Can a translation properly convey the verb tense in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? Does the original Spanish text of Vargas Llosa’s Captain Pantoja and the Special Service use an elegant writing style or the spoken vernacular of the streets?
If you open the new Chinese translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, you’ll find the following commentary from the translator: “I have compared the English and Japanese translations of the book and discovered quite a few problems with the translations, especially the English version, where mistranslations and omissions are common.” Indeed, in recent years, many people have pointed out that a number of translations are riddled with mistranslations, misinterpretations, omissions, and adaptations. There are unintentional misunderstandings, as well as deliberate simplifications that go as far as rewriting the text. It seems that if we want to better understand the original work, we need to seek out multiple translations for comparison, hope that someone else will retranslate the text, or simply learn more foreign languages.
But don’t assume that I am searching for the ultimate, perfect translation. I am not. There’s never a fixed and eternal “absolute spirit” in books. Translations are interpretations, and the same text holds the possibility of multiple interpretations. Each interpreter can thus proclaim “Madame Bovary is me,” and no one will object that there are too many Madame Bovarys. When it comes to translators of the body’s language, of course the experts are biologists and doctors, who might give the appearance of being more scientific and objective. From the perspective of the development of humanity as a whole, however, due to disparate experiences, customs, and other factors, there are conflicting interpretations. We’ve benefited from misreadings and retranslations for a long time. Dare I say that it is impossible to have a sole, absolute version of a translation, whether now or in the future?
About Xi Xi
Xi Xi—a pseudonym of Ellen Cheung Yin— is one of Hong Kong’s most beloved and prolific authors. Born in Shanghai in 1937, she moved to Hong Kong in 1950 and is among the first generation of writers to have grown up in the territory. She began writing during the late 1950s and is the award-winning author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as numerous newspaper and magazine columns and screenplays. Most recently, she is the winner of the 2019 Newman Prize in Chinese Literature.